Michelle Yeoh is the most charismatic of the supporting cast, an excellent contrast to Zhang as she in her own way seeks to leave her past behind (and her fight scene is spectacular). Zhang’s an effective lead, managing to hold our sympathy even when brooding and refusing to return to a life of violence.
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The movie as a whole is bright and colourful, and the fights in particular are beautiful (especially a wirework confrontation fought among the neon signs of a major street - which also incidentally helps set up the street as a location and the bright lights of the signs as a visual and thematic motif). Each has its own tone and its own mix of fighting styles, and its own location that plays into the fight. Each of them is an excellent set piece that does structurally what a set piece is supposed to do: sum up and advance character, theme, and story. Those fights themselves are everything one might hope for in a Yuen Woo-ping movie. Most importantly, given the kind of movie this is, the story’s an excellent framework for setting up conflict, and specifically fight scenes. If occasionally characters drop out of the film for a time - most notably Cheung’s young son - we don’t notice. The different relationships among the characters provide complexities and shadings to these motivations, and the variety of strands in the plot are woven with dexterity. Those motivations are big bright primary-colour emotions: love, love of power, and revenge. The story’s a function of individuals with relatable motivations reacting against each other, and develops accordingly. Put like that the film may sound complicated or soap-operatic, but in practice it’s all very clear and sets up a plot that’s engagingly complex yet relatively character-centred. And what part does restaurateur and community leader Owen Davidson (Dave Bautista) have to play in all this? Unfortunately, that part of town is where Kit wants to peddle drugs. After Cheung gets involved in a fight between Kit and a young woman named Julia (Liu Yan) - who’s sticking up for her friend and roommate, the opium addict Nana (Chrissie Chau) - he ends up working in the bar owned by Julia’s brother Fu (Naason), who’s engaged to Nana. Most particularly, there’s Kit (Kevin Cheng), a hotheaded drug-peddling gangster with a withered arm, and Kit’s sister Kwan (Michelle Yeoh), who leads a crime syndicate she wants to make into an honest organisation despite the corrupt British rule in Hong Kong. As the movie starts, he leaves this life for a more honest path.
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When we meet him, in Hong Kong in 1961, he’s sunk so far as to have become a semi-principled gangland heavy. Master Z is the story of one of the masters Ip Man defeated in one of the earlier movies, Cheung Tin Chi (Zhang Jin, also credited as Max Zhang I’m told this film’s title comes from an alternate way of romanising ‘Cheung’). Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, it’s a spin-off from the three Ip Man films that starred Donnie Yen (a producer for this movie), which were loosely based on the life of the kung fu master who taught Bruce Lee.
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(I once worked out my version of the truism as “all readings of art will depend in part on the reader’s historical and political situation,” which is why I’m not a sloganeer.)Ĭonsider Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (originally 葉問外傳:張天志, romanised as Yip Man ngoi zyun: Cheung Tin Chi). Individual perspective and changing circumstances will give a work very different meanings, possibly including different political significance. And no work of art can be read only one way. I would prefer to phrase it as “all art can be read politically,” because art has to be interpreted. There’s a critical truism that all art is political.